Clem's Cumberland-Style Pork Sausages
 

This style of pork sausage originates from Cumbria in north-west England (Latitude 54.5000 Longitude -3.2500). I refer to the sausages which I made as Cumberland-styled rather than Cumberland sausages because the latter was granted protected Geographical Indication status in March 2011. Only sausages made within a defined geographical area to a specific recipe may be called Cumberland sausages. The UK government's Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs specification for Cumberland sausages can be found here.


For my sausages I use the following recipe:

Item

Quantity

Coarse ground pork
(I used 50% pork belly [fatty]to 50% pork shoulder [lean])

If you do not like pork, you can try using chicken or other poultry; beef, venison etc.

800 g

Rusk or bread crumbs
(water added until doughy consistency is obtained. For this run, I used 200 g of water (it all depends on the rusk or breadcrumb characteristics)

200 g

 

You can substitute pork with beef or a vegetarian mock ingredient.
 

You can obtain your pork mince from the butcher or supermarket, making sure that you know what the fat to lean ration is of the product. I coarse ground my own mince using Pork Shoulder and Belly Pork.
 


The mince being coarse ground
 


 

You add the flavouring ingredients next.

Flavouring ingredients per 1000 g of meat/rusk mix:
 

Salt

18 g

Pepper

4.0 g

Thyme

2.0 g

Sage

2.0 g

Nutmeg

0.5 g

Mace

0.5 g

Cayenne

0.5 g


Chill the meat mix in the refrigerator before working in the spices and herbs.
This will minimize the fats melting during mixing/incorporation.

 


The mince, breadcrumbs and flavouring ingredients
 


I used a dried collagen casing which is prepared by immersion in water for a couple of hours prior to use. For ease of stuffing, I used the sausage stuffer attachment to my mixer:



Sausage filling begins. The casing is loaded on to the nozzle and then tied off at the start of the sausage length.
 


Long lengths of sausage after extrusion


After extrusion, you will need to carefully knead the stuffing within the casing to ease any trapped air out of the casing (tricky job). If there are visible air pockets, you can release the air buy using a pricking implement to poke the casing. When you are happy with the result, you can tie off both ends of the length of stuffed casing while making sure that the filling is not overly full and taut (so that you allow space for the stuffing to be pushed tighter when making sausage links, and to prevent over-filled sausages bursting during cooking). Pinch the length of stuffed casing at each point which you would like there to be a link and then twist the casing around that link.  You should end up with your work looking like this:
 


The sausage lengths tied into links
 



Cumberland-style sausages and eggs for brekkie
 




 
ENJOY!

 

27 March 2024
 


 

 

 

 



Created by Clem Kuek